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American astronomers called on Thursday for the nation to invest in a new generation of “extremely large”, multibillion-dollar telescopes that will be larger than any currently in orbit on Earth or in space.

The investment will require salvaging and combining the efforts of two competing projects, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope. When completed, these telescopes, with primary collecting mirrors of 25 and 30 meters in diameter, will be about 100 times more sensitive than any telescope currently in operation.

It would allow astronomers to peer deep into the cores of distant galaxies where monstrous black holes roam and radiate energy; investigating mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy; and study planets around stars other than the sun. Perhaps more importantly, they may raise new questions about the nature of the universe.

But astronomers struggled for years to raise enough money to make their dreams come true. In the new proposal, the National Science Foundation will provide $1.6 billion to finish both projects and then help run them as part of a new program called the United States Extremely Large Telescope.

On Thursday, astronomers urged NASA to begin a new Major Observatory Mission and Technology Maturation Program that will develop a range of astrophysical spacecraft over the next 20 to 30 years. The first will be an optical telescope larger than the Hubble Space Telescope that can locate and study Earth-like planets (potentially habitable “exo-Earths”) in the nearby cosmos. Astronomers said it could be ready in 2040 and would cost $11 billion, and only NASA could achieve this.

These two recommendations were the largest in the long-awaited 614-page report, Pathways of Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s, released Thursday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Every 10 years for the past 70 years, the Academy has sponsored a survey of the astronomy community to set priorities for big-ticket items over the next decade. The Decadal Survey, as it is known, is attracting the attention of Congress, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy.

This year’s effort, chaired by Fiona A. Harrison of the California Institute of Technology and Robert C. Kennicutt, Jr. of the University of Arizona, took three years and required dozens of meetings and discussions among 13 sub-panels covering all branches of astronomy. In total, 860 White Papers were submitted to the survey, describing the telescopes that could be built, the space missions that needed to be launched, the experiments or observations that needed to be made, and the diversity the astronomical community needed to address.

In an interview, Dr. Harrison said his committees are trying to balance greed against the amount of time and money these projects will take. For example, various ideas have emerged for planet-seeking spacecraft. Some were very large, some were very small; some take a century to execute. Rather than choosing one of these, the group asked the community and NASA to come back with ideas for a six-meter-diameter space telescope. (Hubble’s main mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter.)

Dr. “A six-foot telescope seems like an achievable goal,” Harrison said.

“This is an inherently ambitious pursuit,” he added. “Only NASA, only the USA can do that. We believe we can do it,” he said.

Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Astronomical Research Universities, or AURA, which operates observatories for the National Science Foundation, described the decade’s report as “pretty bold” in an email. “And for decades, they didn’t hesitate to articulate a vision that was actually what it was going to get and get.”

Ten-year surveys have a track record of success. Both the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and still in operation, and the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to see the beginning of time and scheduled for launch next month, have benefited from ranking highly in previous decades of research.

And so the results of each new survey are eagerly awaited by the astronomy and astrophysics community. “The committee was highly confidential,” said Natalie Batalha, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who played a leading role in NASA’s Kepler planet-finding mission, in an email on the eve of the report’s release. “Honestly I haven’t heard anything. I’m waiting on pins and needles.”

In Thursday’s report, the Academy outlined three overarching scientific goals for the next decade: the search for habitable planets and life; the study of black holes and neutron stars responsible for the most violent events in nature; and the growth and evolution of galaxies.

“The next decades will set humanity on a path to determine whether we are alone,” the report said. “Life on Earth may be the result of a common process or require such an extraordinary set of conditions that we are the only living beings in our own part of the galaxy, or even in the universe. Both answers are profound.”

The idea of ​​the Extremely Large Telescope program is ambitious because it involves blending two competing telescope projects. Thirty Meter Telescope planned for the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii or the Canary Islands in Spain and Giant Magellanic Telescope continues in Chile.

Both telescopes are dream products of sprawling international collaborations and two decades of fundraising and recruiting partners. Both telescopes will be about three times larger than anything currently on Earth and 100 times more capable of discerning faint distant stars in the cosmos; Working together, they can tackle deep questions about the cosmos. But neither project has raised enough money—more than $2 billion needed—to meet its goals.

Failure to build these telescopes would leave leadership in ground-based astronomy to Europe, which is building a 39-metre telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is expected to be operational in 2027 – the European Extremely Large Telescope. That was until the 1993 cancellation of the American Superconducting Super Collider project, which handed over the future of particle physics to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

If the National Science Foundation investing to complete two telescopeswould gain significant observation time on them, which would then be distributed to American astronomers.

Dr. “Two telescopes of completely different designs, located in opposite hemispheres, would be perfectly suited for complementary interrogations of the cosmos,” said Harrison. “It is unthinkable to imagine that the United States would not have access to it,” he said.

Great challenges await. The giant Magellanic team has already broken ground in Chile, but progress on the Thirty Meter Telescope has protests and blockades by indigenous Hawaiian and other groups. An alternative location has been identified at La Palma in the Canary Islands.

Astronomers hope that given the emphasis on existing infrastructure and growing science budgets, the stars will align for their daring visions. But they’re haunting a history of cost overruns, especially with the James Webb Space Telescope, which will finally launch in December after years of delay and with a final price tag of $10 billion.

“JWST on top of all this – the whole program will depend on its success,” said Michael Turner, now a cosmologist at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles and a veteran of ten years of research. “Fingers crossed.”